Jerry Beck: historian, film preservationist, producer, promoter of animation festivals and events, and prolific author.

I met Jerry Beck for the first time in 2003 while visiting L.A. Not long after that he gave me the opportunity to work with him and several other contributors on The Animated Movie Guide. I was aware that Jerry had written some great books, but I was amazed at all the other projects he has been (and continues to be) involved with, every one of them in the area of animation. Jerry truly lives an animation buff’s dream life, and recently I got in touch with him in order to have him tell us a bit about his career to date. It’s a wild and frantic story, one well worth hearing and enjoying.

Dr. Toon: Jerry, you’ve had a career as a historian, a film preservationist, a producer, a promoter of animation festivals and events, and a rather prolific author. Talk about the path that led up to the development of Hornswiggle, your very first animated cartoon.

Jerry Beck: I had wanted to make a cartoon ever since I was a kid, certainly since high school. I always drew comics throughout school, underground-type comics. Robert Crumb, Marvel Comics, Superman comics — everything I grew up with in the ‘60s and ‘70s influenced me. I graduated high school in the mid-’70s, and I wanted to be an animator. I had rediscovered the Warner Bros. toons on television. It wasn’t really until my high school years that you could say I “caught the bug.” I used to watch the Warner cartoons when I came home from school, and I realized, “These are great!” I was into superheroes, stuff like (Jack) Kirby and (Jim) Steranko. Realize that to be into comics in the early ‘70s was kind of weird, not as accepted as it is today.

Then, to rediscover cartoons, to really admire the craft of the animation, the humor, the voice work of Mel Blanc, well, as a teenager that was even weirder than saying you were into comics. You’re talking about funny animals! But I left the superhero stuff behind and really got into animated cartoons. That included the emerging anime films, the old Superman cartoons, Jonny Quest — you know, things for the red-blooded male! I loved the Warner toons the most and that’s when I started to research them. I could see that in the 1970s then animation was at its point of death. It was just horrible, and there was nothing happening. Even studios like Disney were doing their worst work.

(Jerry and I are just about the same age, and at this point our lives, we’re eerily similar. However, Jerry’s drive to learn about and practice animation took him in directions I still sometimes wish I had taken.)

Beck befriended historian and critic Leonard Maltin and soon Beck served as research assistant to Maltin’s Of Mice and Magic.

Here I was in New York City, where we had a wonderful animation community made up of all the old-timers like Jack Zander and Howard Beckerman, who was a real mentor. I would go to ASIFA meetings and the Museum of Modern Art. I got cultured in foreign and independent animation and I tried to figure out how to get into that business. After high school, I bolted to the School of Visual Arts and enrolled in a bunch of courses in cartooning and animation. I got to meet people there like Tom Sito and Dan Haskett.

I became friends with this animation community. By taking these courses — this was around ‘75 or ‘76, I personally came to feel that I just didn’t have it. Working next to people like Sito and Haskett, well these guys could really draw and animate. These guys were amazing, and there was no work for them. None. And I was still drawing stick figures, really. I felt very discouraged and didn’t feel as if I had a chance to be in animation. I lost my own initiative to be in the field as an artist. Part of what you do at the animation classes is shoot a pencil test and make a film, and I did. It was a little film about a guy with a ray gun, just really simplistic, something to demonstrate animation. I remember thinking, “Hey, there’s my little guy moving!” It wasn’t very good; I’ve got it buried in my closet somewhere, future, “classic Jerry Beck DVD bonus material!”

But at the same time I was going to school, they were showing cartoons on 16mm projectors and I started to collect cartoons. That was where I got into the history aspect. I realized around ‘75 that, as much as I loved these things, there were no books about them. There were no books that listed all of the Warner cartoons, or books about the histories of the studios. I meandered over to The New School For Social Research, another school in New York, and that’s where Leonard Maltin was teaching a class on the history of animation. He had just come out with his book on the Disney films, and The Great Movie Shorts, which I loved. I had to take this class, even if it was just to meet Leonard, and I wanted to encourage him to do a book like The Great Movie Shorts, only about cartoons.

(Lucky guy! At this time my classes consisted of abnormal psychology, theories of personality and learning the now-outmoded original version of the MMPI. Maltin was not among my profs, and the ones I had did not know that Bob Clampett was the original animator of Daffy Duck.)

From that first class, we ended up becoming friends, and we still are to this day. We would talk about it, but Leonard was discouraged about doing a book on cartoons because Mike Barrier announced that he was doing his own book in the pages of Funnyworld. But Barrier’s book, as you know, took 25 years to come out. After about a year, Leonard turned to me and said, “You know, I think we could do a book on animated cartoons. Let’s go for it.” We always felt that Barrier’s book was going to come out any minute while we worked on Of Mice and Magic. It was a weird fear we had, about that book that didn’t even exist!